1032 - A Judge Rules on Vaccines
Public Health On Call
The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health
4.6 • 644 Ratings
🗓️ 6 April 2026
⏱️ 18 minutes
🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS
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Summary
About this episode:
A federal judge has halted changes from the Department of Health and Human Services to the childhood immunization schedule and the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practice. In this episode: the impact of this decision and what comes next.
Guest:
Sarah Despres, JD, is a lawyer with over 25 years of experience in public health policy and advocacy and is an expert on immunization policy. She served as counselor to the Secretary of Health and Human Services from 2021-2025.
Host:
Lindsay Smith Rogers, MA, is the producer of the Public Health On Call podcast, an editor for Expert Insights, and the director of content strategy for the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
Show links and related content:
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Judge blocks US government from slimming down vaccine recommendations—Associated Press
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Trust in federal government drops when it comes to childhood vaccines, poll suggests—CIDRAP
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HHS Changes Its Pediatric Vaccine Recommendations: What's Different, What Remains, and What It Means for American Health—Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health
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Changes to the CDC's Vaccine Advisory Committee—Public Health On Call (June 2025)
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to Public Health On Call, a podcast from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, |
| 0:05.9 | where we bring evidence, experience, and perspective to make sense of today's leading health challenges. |
| 0:16.3 | If you have questions or ideas for us, please send an email to public health question at jhhhu.edu. |
| 0:23.8 | That's public health question at jhhu.edu for future podcast episodes. |
| 0:31.1 | Hey listeners, it's Lindsay Smith-Rogers. Today, the federal court case on vaccine policy. |
| 0:36.5 | I speak with Sarah Daypre, an expert in immunization |
| 0:39.7 | policy about the details of the case and its immediate impacts on vaccine policy, innovation, |
| 0:45.6 | and public opinion. We also talk about the potentially larger meaning of the decision on HHS Secretary |
| 0:51.8 | Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s approach to vaccine policy. Let's listen. |
| 0:56.7 | Sarah DePray, thank you so much for joining us again on public health on call. How are you? |
| 1:00.8 | Good, thanks. How are you? I'm great. Today we're going to talk to you about the federal court case |
| 1:05.9 | involving vaccine policy. But before we get to that, would you just give us a brief intro of you and your work? |
| 1:11.6 | Yeah, sure, happy to. I'm a lawyer by training. I spent about 13 years on Capitol Hill |
| 1:17.7 | working on the Senate side and mostly on the House side on the Energy and Commerce Committee |
| 1:23.3 | and the House Oversight Committee focused primarily on public health, including vaccine policy. |
| 1:28.8 | I then went to the Pew Charitable Trust, where I ran the Government Relations Division for their |
| 1:35.2 | public health portfolio and then joined the Biden administration on day two or day three of the |
| 1:39.9 | administration and was there serving as a counselor to Secretary Bacera on public health for four |
| 1:45.2 | years. And I'm currently a consultant working for several nonprofits, focused primarily on immunization |
| 1:51.6 | issues. So describe this court case to us. What happened here? What was the decision? |
| 1:57.4 | Yeah. So the American Academy of Pediatrics and a number of other public health |
| 2:02.6 | and professionals groups and professional societies sued HHS regarding the decisions that |
... |
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